February has been another busy month for releases across their Office clients on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. There are a number of exciting new capabilities in Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. In addition, they released the first cumulative feature update since the initial September release of the Office 2016 apps—otherwise known as the “Deferred Channel” build—for their commercial customers. Read on for the details.

Enhancing the Office experience on mobile devices

Microsoft are continuing to make Office on mobile devices even easier, more natural, fluid and contextual, so you can use Office to do more, faster, with whatever device you have in your hand.

Annotate with ink on Windows tablets—Last month they discussed the evolution of the inking experience in Office. Now you can use your pen, finger and the new tools in the Draw tab to naturally write, draw and annotate in Word, Excel and PowerPoint Mobile on Windows tablets (available initially to Office Insiders).

Review and comment on documents with your pen or finger—no printing required.

Pin your docs to the Start menu on Windows phones and tablets—It’s even easier to pick up where you left off by pinning your favorite documents, spreadsheets, presentations and notes to the Windows Start menu. Get going in just a couple of taps!

Pin your documents to the Start menu to get going in one tap.

Insert images using the camera on your phone or tablet— Office apps are now integrated with your device’s built-in camera, so you can capture images, crop and insert them directly into your documents on Windows and Android phones and tablets. This is available now in PowerPoint for Office Insiders and will be coming soon for Word and Excel.

Capture and crop images directly into Office apps using the built-in camera on your Windows and Android phones and tablets.

Enabling partner storage to integrate in Office for iPhone and iPad—Last month, Microsoft announced the opportunity for all Cloud Storage Partner Program (CSPP) providers to integrate with Office for iOS. This integration is now available with Box in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Other partners are coming soon.

Box integration is now available in Word, Excel and PowerPoint on iPhone and iPad.

Boosting Excel with more functions, charts and sharing options

They added more ways to manipulate, visualise and share your data with Excel. New functions make it simpler and faster to build common calculations and improved Formula AutoComplete helps you find the function you’re looking for (click here for more information). The launch of Excel 2016 brought you new chart types, such as Treemap, Sunburst and Waterfall. Now they added the Funnel chart for Windows desktops, tablets and phones, as well as Android, enabling you to display data in progressively decreasing proportions.

Microsoft are also making it easier than ever to share what you work on in Excel with others. Excel is now more integrated into the Power BI service. This means you can now pin your workbook’s rich formatted charts and graphs directly to your Power BI dashboards and interact with them from anywhere—giving you even more options for telling your story through data.

Outlook 2016 helps you stay connected with your Office 365 Groups by providing integrated access to your team’s shared inbox, shared calendar, OneNote notebook, OneDrive and more. Now they're making it even easier for commercial Office 365 customers to browse, join and create Office 365 Groups right from within Outlook 2016. They're adding a new Groups section to the ribbon with easy entry points to browse and join Office 365 Groups. Suggested Groups offer one-click access to relevant Groups you might like to join, personalised based on information in the Office Graph. You can also create new Groups from the ribbon.

It’s even easier to browse, join and create relevant Office 365 Groups from within Outlook 2016.

Microsoft are also introducing an Archive capability in Outlook 2016 that lets you quickly move messages out of your inbox and into another folder. This will allow you to triage your inbox with an experience similar to archiving in other email services like Outlook.com. Archive is rolling out to Outlook 2016, coming soon for Outlook for Mac and available today in Outlook on iOS, Android and the web.

Archive is coming to Outlook 2016 to help you triage your inbox more quickly.

Office for Mac updates

Office has addressed key customer feedback with improvements and new features for Office for Mac.

Morph is now part of PowerPoint for Mac—Morph is one of the latest PowerPoint tools that helps you create stunning presentations quickly. The Morph transition effect helps you easily transform and move several objects at once across slides.

The Morph transition effect is now available in PowerPoint for Mac and the Quick Access Toolbar in the top-left is now customisable.

Customise the Quick Access Toolbar – In response to a top user request, Word, Excel and PowerPoint for Mac now allow you to customise commands in the Quick Access Toolbar. Pick your favorite commands (such as New, Print or Save) to show at all times in the top-left corner.

Faster updates—Office for Mac users who stay current can now download just the latest incremental changes since the last release. This means faster downloads of smaller update packages, with download sizes to drop even more in the coming months.

They've seen over 150,000 downloads of early builds of Office for Mac apps through the Office Insiders program since initial availability last month. If you haven’t joined yet, opt in to the Office Insider build from the Microsoft Auto Update (MAU) tool on your Mac. To learn more about Office Insider on Mac, go to Office.com/Insider.

Office 2016 build now available for commercial customers in Deferred Channel

Microsoft are releasing the first Office 365 Deferred Channel build, which is effectively the September 22, 2015 release of Office 2016 with four additional months of security updates included. Deferred Channel allows commercial customers to elect to receive cumulative packages of new Office features three times a year, instead of in monthly updates. This can be helpful for taking extra time to validate add-ins, macros, custom line-of-business applications, etc. Customers on Deferred Channel can get the new build of Office 2016 in the Office 365 User Software Page as well as the Office CDN.